‘The Tolerance That Is Only Skin Deep’

Standing outside an Atlanta club on Friday night where I’d performed an amped-up version of “White Lightning” in honor of Jones’s passing, a self-proclaimed fan of mine told me he’d mentioned Ol’ Possum’s death on Facebook, only to receive a verbal feces-smearing by someone who called Jones a “racist” and a “redneck” who deserves to “rot in hell.”

As far as this guy could tell, his Facebook buddy felt Jones’s main transgression was that he was a white man who sang country music and was therefore automatically less than human.